5 Telltale Signs your Website Needs an SEO Content Audit

Has your website been getting less and less organic search traffic? Or perhaps you’ve noticed your site ranking has been steadily falling? These are symptoms that your marketing is no longer performing as well as it should.

A content audit could be the key to rejuvenating your marketing. An SEO content audit is an assessment of your company’s web content for its SEO value. This includes examining the relevance of the content and overall quality. Most audits use a comprehensive approach to identify the problems and then correct them, to enhance your website for better results. Here are 5 telltale signs you need to conduct a content audit.

1. Website has Duplicate Content

During the process of making and updating your website, you may have accidentally produced duplicate content. Duplicate content is very harmful to your metadata, because it tells search engines that your site is disorganized and hard to navigate – or worse, plagiarized. A content audit is a key step to remove duplications and streamline your content.

2. Website has Broken Links

When other webpages that your site links to are deleted or relocated, those links become ‘broken’. If your website starts to accumulate broken links, search engines can take this as a sign that your site has been abandoned. Search engines can also see sites with a number of broken links as spam sites, causing your site to be ranked lower. A content audit can be used to check all links and ensure they are still intact and adding value to your site.

3. Content needs to be Updated

It’s just the nature of many industries and businesses to be fast paced and frequently changing. If this is true for your industry, your website content can quickly become outdated and irrelevant. Not only will this be annoying to potential customers, it will also affect your search engine ranking. Use a content audit to identify the content you need to update and make it more relevant.

4. Content is Under-Promoted

Your website may have many different pages and plenty of relevant content. However, having too much of a good thing can make it hard to know which content you most want to promote. A content audit can help you identify content pieces that have value and should be more promoted further, which allows you to use existing content to improve rankings.

5. Content Quality is Low

Search engine algorithms are getting smarter and smarter, and they have a preference for high-quality content. If your content is low quality, search engines will know and downgrade your site accordingly. A content audit can help you identify which specific content is below quality standards, so you can edit those pieces to improve your search engine rankings.